Coming Unstuck

Have broken through my stuck period and have two new poems that I have been working on in the last 10 days. One called Resist which arose from a first unsatisfactory first draft of an exercise we did at Pataka. I took the section I quite liked and reworked it, still tweaking it. The second one called Democracy came from exercise that I got people to try in my presentation. I’m still working on it and making good progress. A third poem I’m struggling with about a childhood experience, I really want to get it out but at the moment I’m not happy with it but not sure what it needs, will probably send it as is to Elizabeth and see if she has any suggestions. Feel like things are ticking over pretty well.

Reading wise have been reading around the death penalty in the USA. First book I read was by Sister Helen Prejean a Catholic nun who wrote Dead Man Walking about her experiences as spiritual adviser to death row inmate Patrick Sonniere before he was executed in the electric chair. This book was called The death of Innocents it chronicles the executions of two men on death row who the have been refused DNA testing that would in all likelihood exonerate them. One who had an IQ less than 70 (this means clinically he was mentally retarded horrifically it is not unusual for people who are mentally retarted to be executed!) both cases showed both the inflexibility of the American system of justice and how it is little interested in justice. Most guys on the row are black uneducated and poor and have killed someone white. The percentage of people on the row for killing African Americans or other minorities is pretty much nil. The other piece of info which stunned me is that America is one of only two countries in the world who refuses to sign the UN charter to project children, because this would stop them from executing children under 18 which they regularly do! This book focused on the prospective of people convicted in what is shown as an increasingly arbitrary politically driven system. I wanted to get some insight into how these guys (some innocent and some guilty) can spend dozens of year sitting on the row under a system that seeks to systematically dehumanize them and still keep some flame of resilience and human dignity alive within themselves.

The other book I read was called The Last Face you’ll ever See this book is told from the perspective of those men who do the executing. This was a chilling and really hard book to read. It graphically describes gas chamber executions and the mind set of many executioners and DA’s who resisted the introduction of the lethal injection as they felt the prisoner would not suffer enough in this kind of death. Often highly religious men they are satisfied that God sanctions this ‘legal’ form of killing. Interestingly the majority of these men, although they say they agree with what they are doing, do suffer from psychological problems from doing this job long term, many are on depression medication or use alcohol excessively. It seems to me from reading these two books that both executed and executor suffer and for society to ask human beings to kill other human beings in this way is cowardly and just plain wrong.

Have two new books of poetry that I am looking forward to exploring a collection of Suheir Hammad an American/Palestinian and another called Poets for Palestine a collection of poets writing about the occupation of Palestine.